Africa
Ukraine Says Repelled Russia Nighttime Drone Attack
Ukraine said Friday it repelled a nighttime drone attack from Russia, a day after Moscow launched a new wave of missile strikes in the run-up to New Year celebrations. The attacks came 10 months into Moscow's invasion of Ukraine. In recent months Russian strikes have targeted the energy grid, leaving millions in the cold in the middle of winter. Ukraine's air force said on Friday morning that Russia attacked Ukraine overnight using "Iranian-made kamikaze drones". A total of 16 drones were launched from the southeastern and northern directions and they were "all" destroyed by Ukraine's air defence, it said.
Artificial Intelligence in Oil & Gas Market Research Report by Function, Component, Application, Region - Global Forecast to 2027 - Cumulative Impact of COVID-19
Market Statistics: The report provides market sizing and forecast across 7 major currencies - USD, EUR, JPY, GBP, AUD, CAD, and CHF. It helps organization leaders make better decisions when currency exchange data is readily available. In this report, the years 2018 and 2020 are considered as historical years, 2021 as the base year, 2022 as the estimated year, and years from 2023 to 2027 are considered as the forecast period. Market Segmentation & Coverage: This research report categorizes the Artificial Intelligence in Oil & Gas to forecast the revenues and analyze the trends in each of the following sub-markets: Based on Function, the market was studied across Field Services, Material Movement, Predictive Maintenance & Machine Inspection, Production Planning, Quality Control, and Reclamation. Based on Component, the market was studied across Hardware, Services, and Software.
12 Sci-Fi Stories to Help Make Sense of the Climate, Risk, and Our Digital Lives
Five years ago, Future Tense Fiction started publishing a short science-fiction story each month. Our goal was simple: to give people more tools to imagine our future through tales that inspire us to weigh reasons for concern against excitement, caution against exploration. More than 60 stories later--plus accompanying response essays and art--we've covered mobility and A.I. ethics, space exploration and biometric surveillance, gig work and military tech, gender and the relationships between humans and animals โฆ and much more. The stories serve as both alarm clocks and lighthouses, waking us up to challenges stemming from scientific and technological change and guiding us toward possible ways forward. They are written by authors and journalists, but also by researchers, doctors, and policymakers, from the U.S. and elsewhere (Hong Kong, Norway, Mexico, Sri Lanka, and Nigeria, to name a few).
Artificial intelligence in 2022: the AIhub roundup
It's been another interesting year in the world of artificial intelligence. We've seen large language models grow even larger, conferences returning to physical events, a raft of new policy developments, and machine learning techniques applied across the arts. Buckle up and join us for the ride as we review the year just gone. Research into both fundamental and applied aspects of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues apace. Yue Ma and colleagues used machine-learning techniques to identify antimicrobial peptides encoded by the genome sequences of microbes in the human gut.
Wealth Redistribution and Mutual Aid: Comparison using Equivalent/Nonequivalent Exchange Models of Econophysics
Given the wealth inequality worldwide, there is an urgent need to identify the mode of wealth exchange through which it arises. To address the research gap regarding models that combine equivalent exchange and redistribution, this study compares an equivalent market exchange with redistribution based on power centers and a nonequivalent exchange with mutual aid using the Polanyi, Graeber, and Karatani modes of exchange. Two new exchange models based on multi-agent interactions are reconstructed following an econophysics approach for evaluating the Gini index (inequality) and total exchange (economic flow). Exchange simulations indicate that the evaluation parameter of the total exchange divided by the Gini index can be expressed by the same saturated curvilinear approximate equation using the wealth transfer rate and time period of redistribution and the surplus contribution rate of the wealthy and the saving rate. However, considering the coercion of taxes and its associated costs and independence based on the morality of mutual aid, a nonequivalent exchange without return obligation is preferred. This is oriented toward Graeber's baseline communism and Karatani's mode of exchange D, with implications for alternatives to the capitalist economy.
Adapting the Exploration Rate for Value-of-Information-Based Reinforcement Learning
Sledge, Isaac J., Principe, Jose C.
In this paper, we consider the problem of adjusting the exploration rate when using value-of-information-based exploration. We do this by converting the value-of-information optimization into a problem of finding equilibria of a flow for a changing exploration rate. We then develop an efficient path-following scheme for converging to these equilibria and hence uncovering optimal action-selection policies. Under this scheme, the exploration rate is automatically adapted according to the agent's experiences. Global convergence is theoretically assured. We first evaluate our exploration-rate adaptation on the Nintendo GameBoy games Centipede and Millipede. We demonstrate aspects of the search process, like that it yields a hierarchy of state abstractions. We also show that our approach returns better policies in fewer episodes than conventional search strategies relying on heuristic, annealing-based exploration-rate adjustments. We then illustrate that these trends hold for deep, value-of-information-based agents that learn to play ten simple games and over forty more complicated games for the Nintendo GameBoy system. Performance either near or well above the level of human play is observed.
Synthetic Aperture Sensing for Occlusion Removal with Drone Swarms
Nathan, Rakesh John Amala Arokia, Kurmi, Indrajit, Bimber, Oliver
We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing conditions, such as occlusion density and target view obliqueness, provide much faster and much more reliable results than previous, blind sampling strategies that are based on pre-defined waypoints. An adapted real-time particle swarm optimization and a new objective function are presented that are able to deal with dynamic and highly random through-foliage conditions. Synthetic aperture sensing is our fundamental sampling principle, and drone swarms are employed to approximate the optical signals of extremely wide and adaptable airborne lenses.
BSA -- Bi-Stiffness Actuation for optimally exploiting intrinsic compliance and inertial coupling effects in elastic joint robots
Ossadnik, Dennis, Yildirim, Mehmet C., Wu, Fan, Swikir, Abdalla, Kussaba, Hugo T. M., Abdolshah, Saeed, Haddadin, Sami
Compliance in actuation has been exploited to generate highly dynamic maneuvers such as throwing that take advantage of the potential energy stored in joint springs. However, the energy storage and release could not be well-timed yet. On the contrary, for multi-link systems, the natural system dynamics might even work against the actual goal. With the introduction of variable stiffness actuators, this problem has been partially addressed. With a suitable optimal control strategy, the approximate decoupling of the motor from the link can be achieved to maximize the energy transfer into the distal link prior to launch. However, such continuous stiffness variation is complex and typically leads to oscillatory swing-up motions instead of clear launch sequences. To circumvent this issue, we investigate decoupling for speed maximization with a dedicated novel actuator concept denoted Bi-Stiffness Actuation. With this, it is possible to fully decouple the link from the joint mechanism by a switch-and-hold clutch and simultaneously keep the elastic energy stored. We show that with this novel paradigm, it is not only possible to reach the same optimal performance as with power-equivalent variable stiffness actuation, but even directly control the energy transfer timing. This is a major step forward compared to previous optimal control approaches, which rely on optimizing the full time-series control input.
The Deep Learning Market is Expected to grow at a CAGR of 49% by 2027 - Digital Journal
Forecasts from Persistence Market Research indicate that by the end of the forecast period in 2027, the worldwide deep learning market would be worth US$ 261,113.0 This indicates a 49.0% compound annual growth rate that was seen over the anticipated period. This development can be ascribed to the demand for improved processing hardware, an increase in global R&D activity in particular industries, and the quick global adoption of cloud-based technologies. A recent research from Persistence Market Research offers a complete review of the worldwide deep learning market. In-depth analysis of the deep learning concept and the performance of the global deep learning market across significant end-use industry sectors throughout seven significant geographies are provided in this study.
Active Learning Through a Covering Lens
Yehuda, Ofer, Dekel, Avihu, Hacohen, Guy, Weinshall, Daphna
Deep active learning aims to reduce the annotation cost for the training of deep models, which is notoriously data-hungry. Until recently, deep active learning methods were ineffectual in the low-budget regime, where only a small number of examples are annotated. The situation has been alleviated by recent advances in representation and self-supervised learning, which impart the geometry of the data representation with rich information about the points. Taking advantage of this progress, we study the problem of subset selection for annotation through a "covering" lens, proposing ProbCover - a new active learning algorithm for the low budget regime, which seeks to maximize Probability Coverage. We then describe a dual way to view the proposed formulation, from which one can derive strategies suitable for the high budget regime of active learning, related to existing methods like Coreset. We conclude with extensive experiments, evaluating ProbCover in the low-budget regime. We show that our principled active learning strategy improves the state-of-the-art in the low-budget regime in several image recognition benchmarks. This method is especially beneficial in the semi-supervised setting, allowing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to match the performance of fully supervised methods, while using much fewer labels nonetheless.